Definitions

Not having any real experience working in a library, I was expecting there to be words in the glossary that I was unfamiliar with. I came into the course with little specific knowledge and little experience teaching information literacy, with only a love of books and other materials to bolster my knowledge of reference materials. Reading the index, I found that there were a good number of acronyms that are used primarily in the United States, something to be expected. What I did not expect was the intersection of school library and public library concepts.

What struck me the most, and what I commented on in the discussion is the relation between:

Bibliographic Instruction: Any activity designed to teach students how to locate and use information
Information Literacy:The ability to access, comprehend, use, and evaluate information

Reading this, bibliographic instruction initially struck me as an outdated version of information literacy, or at least a concept of a limited scope that should be a small piece of what makes up information literacy. However, while I know a bit about information literacy as it was certainly an important topic when I did my B.Ed, I had come across this term. I wondered what its practical application was, and if it is commonly used currently and in Canada.

I explained these wonderings in my comment on the discussion on May 14:

Is the key difference regarding the "location of the information" in bibliographic instruction, as opposed the the comprehension cited for information literacy? Surely, though, the "access" in information literacy includes finding it? Location is certainly included in my understanding of information literacy.
Could bibliographic instruction simply be used to refer to the teaching of information literacy? Are they parallel terms from different schools of thought, one of which is not used here?

Anne confirmed my suspicions, when she explained that “Bibliographic instruction predated "info literacy" and actually refers to teaching patrons how to use a library, and more specifically in academic settings teaching undergrads the joys of the Library of Congress classification system.”

By contrast, however, Riedling describes it as “an expression widely used and accepted in the modern library world. It is defined as any activity that is designed to teach students how to locate and use information…teaching lifelong learning skills” (p. 5)

All this leaves me wondering still. Possible, bibliographic instruction could be the action of teaching the skill we can information literacy, although this more common term isn’t mentioned in the textbook’s explanation. Additionally, the glossary definition doesn’t line up with the in-text explanation, which closely parallels the glossary definition of information literacy. I concluded, in the end, that the ambiguity presented by Riedling is likely a product of the intersection worlds of school and public libraries, of the difference in terms in the US, and of the fact that the book is 6 years old and may not quite align with the current quickly changing world of information literacy.